Monday, February 24, 2014

Just name checking the Maywood Glass Company, of Compton, California, whose
mark is the MG at the left. I heard that Dr. Dre's uncle worked there,
maybe. Made a bottle that got drunk sometime during or after 1951 (so
sayeth the "51" in the right-hand square), and ended up broken on a
beach in Olympia. The stipply texture was known as Duraglas when it came
out about a decade earlier.

Nothing but a coastal
thing brought this gLAss up north, so I guess I cannot resort to my
usual "globalization is older than you thought it was, you punk-ass kid"
rant (as if punk-ass kids even gave a shit). Nor do I have any clue
whether any of NWA's aggregate ancestry worked at Maywood Glass, so I
cannot draw a line that runs straight outta Compton toward Olympia (one of the whitest cities in the US).

What I can do is thank
bottle makers for putting their marks on the most durable part of
bottles, and for bothering to code so much information in the first place. Besides the maker and the year, it's fairly common to have a plant code and a bottle style number. Maywood Glass followed the Owen-Illinois convention of reducing the year of manufacture to a number at the right (there was no Y2K panic over this, as far as I know).

Also, I can thank drunks for dropping so many bottles, and for insisting that they be shipped to the far corners of the earth in the first place. Where there are working men (or formerly working men), so there are alcohol bottles. Beer, gin, rum, wine,...these bottles trace the progress of Western civilization across the globe. A rock steady base line that can be read to trace trade and gin up chronologies. Once again, what appears to some as the downfall of society proves to be a windfall for archaeology.

So I pour out a sip for all the fallen homies, who left broken glass everywhere, and make archaeologists' jobs that much easier.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Here's a sequence from before restoration of Mission Creek (September, 2013) and on through to after the first King Tide after the restoration. In the shot above, they're pulling out some of the rubble dumped on the beach in the 20th Century. You can see the pipe, 3 feet in diameter, that was the outlet of Mission Creek for decades. See how the channel traces an lazy S on its way into Budd Inlet?

With the big chunks of concrete gone, this is what the channel looked like, not long after the first shot. Rubble removal has let the channel explore a bit (see the wetted ground insiude the lower curve of the S?), but not all that much has changed.

And here we see the effects of a rainy Fall weekend. There's enough outflow from that one little pipe to flood beyond the S-channel. Maybe this is why we found a log at the south edge of the channel, a check-dam to slow the flow and keep it from eating further south. Look at the mid-range left extreme of the whitewater, and you may notice the horizontal darkness that is that log.

And here above is the outflow in January, after the channel was dug (a few meters north of the old culvert), and then "armored" with cobbles. The photo was taken a bit to the right of the above shots, but you can probably pick out the S-curved outflow channel. The momentarily exhuberant leftward spillage has subdued, and the main flow (again, as all of these shots, at a not-extremely-low tide) is still following the S, more or leSS.

Over time, perhaps, more more than less. This is the lower elevation curve of the S. See how neatly it has undercut the mantle of cobbles introduced during restoration? See the unfortunate clams, exposed to the sun by a subtle nortward migration of said S? See the subtle layers of shell hash upon fine sediment? See the barnacles colonizing what is probably only a temporary mini-cliff? Some species are surprised and maybe killed by this movement, and others take advantage.

I have no idea whether the channel will continue its slow northward migration (but I hope not, because, damn, that's a pretty beach). 150 years ago, the channel was probably north of where it is now, but 150 years ago, the southern lobe of the estuary was not buried, there was not pavement nearby, the "city" of Olympia was a minor burg (capital or no), and the Eastbay Streams (Moxlie and Indian Creeks, in today's parlance) were not themselves culvertized. Maybe Mission Creek will impose itself upon its past and future channel, or maybe not. I intend to watch (and snap shots).